IN HIS THIRD year, Alva Edison’s memory began to retain and correlate the fragmentary impressions of the world that comprise the blur of infancy.1 The most primary of these vignettes was of a broad-faced, dark-haired woman holding him and instructing him, and—more distant yet lustily present—a big man with a chinful of graying beard.2

Although primary, they were not his very first memories, which dated back to the summer of 1849. He was crawling across the floor toward a Mexican silver dollar, thrown down by the young man who came to court his big sister. He was watching a fleet of prairie schooners load up to join the westward gold rush, one of them with his uncle Snow Edison aboard. He was again in Nancy Edison’s arms, but this time she held him up to see Marion, a vision in white at twenty, being given away to the same young man.3

Somewhere near at hand, that December day, would have been his brother Pitt, eighteen, and sister Tannie, sixteen. And somewhere infinitely farther off, in the Baptist heaven his mother kept talking about, were three children dead before he was born.4

That made Alva the youngest of seven and the only child in his father’s house—a vacant-eyed little boy with a huge head. The security that surrounded him was physical (Sam Edison, prospering, had laid every brick and nailed every shingle of the seven-room house overlooking the canal basin) as well as emotional: he had the bulk of his mother’s attention, composed equally of love and discipline. Both parents were, by the standard of the day, well into middle age. Sam, or Samuel Ogden Edison, Jr., in the family Bible, was forty-five at the time of Marion’s wedding, and Nancy forty-one. Since she was unlikely to have any more children, whatever she had left of her genteel, minister’s-daughter culture would be shared exclusively with Alva.5

He was unique among his siblings in another respect, being the only one who was not Canadian born. The Edison family was remotely American in origin, but because of their pro-British sympathies, they had fled north after the Revolution. Sam grew up in Vienna, Ontario, a farming village that had also attracted Nancy’s family, the Elliotts, from upstate New York. He and she had married in 1828 and would probably have continued to live and work in Vienna—Sam as an innkeeper, Nancy as a schoolteacher—had it not been for the “contrairy” streak in Sam that had him rebelling against any prevailing sentiment, even that of his own parents. Just as they had rejected the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and rooted for Great Britain in the War of 1812, he reacted in 1837 against the conservative, clerical regime that had begun to repress free thought in Ontario. Sam participated in an antigovernmental revolt that year, and after it failed, he made the best use of his long legs in skipping across the border to Detroit, with provincial troops in hot pursuit. He was indicted for high treason in Canada and deemed it prudent to start a new life as a carpenter in Milan, Ohio. By 1839 his family had settled with him there. Sam did well enough from various lumbering and auctioneering enterprises to provide a solid bourgeois environment for Thomas Alva Edison to be born in, on the snowy early morning6 of 11 February 1847.

“Milan from near the Sandusky City Road,” by J. Brainerd, 1847.

NOT PLAYING MUCH

Seen from the street, Sam’s house presented its redbrick, white-trimmed facade to the rising sun. Inside and to the west, it commanded a panorama of Milan’s canal basin. He had built it at the highest point of a bluff overlooking the Huron River Valley. Any small boy standing at one of its parlor windows had to be thrilled by the sight, far below, of dozens of lake schooners, laden with wheat, leaving the harbor via the canal and gliding north down the river.7

Milan in the late 1840s was simultaneously a small town of about fifteen hundred inhabitants, and one of the largest primary grain markets in the world. Often a line of five hundred or more four-horse farm wagons could be seen creaking down the hillside into town, laden with wheat. Elsewhere on the slope, a complex system of chutes, hoists, and trolleys offered Alva elementary visual lessons in physics. There was a shipyard adjoining the harbor, and crowds would collect around the Edison house to watch whenever a new schooner was launched below.8

When Alva was old enough to imitate his father’s way with a saw (shingle maker Sam, sizing, splitting, and shaving three-foot “bolts” from Canada), he nailed together plank roads from mill debris, and hung about the yards at the docks memorizing the songs of lumber gangs and canal men. He briefly attended a little red schoolhouse, but there was something about him, with his domed forehead and peculiar habits, such as laboriously drawing copies of the signs on storefronts, that mystified his teachers and repelled many children. “I often run acrost him in town,” a schoolmate wrote many years later, “with just as dirty nose & face as the other boys But he seemed to Be thinking of something all the time & not Playing much…well some of the Boys called him E-dison fool you know how Boys are. But he was far from a fool in some of his remarks his cousin [Lizzie Wadsworth] told me it Puseled her sometimes to get what he meant.”9

Another old Milaner, racking her memory after the fool had become famous, dimly recalled “a child that was always doing funny things different from other children, loved to be by himself.”10 Sam Edison maintained that “Thomas Alva never had any boyhood days.” He was more interested in “steam engines and mechanical forces” than in elementary lessons learned at school.

Was he a remarkable smart boy? Why, no. Some folks thought he was a little addled, I believe. Teacher told us to keep him in the streets, for he would never make a scholar. All he ate went to support his brain, and he was puny. He was forever asking me questions, and when I would tell him I didn’t know, he would say, “Why don’t you know?”^*1,11

One reason the word addled was to recur often in descriptions of young Alva may have been the strange equableness that kept him calm in crises or catastrophes. He seemed unable to understand that burning his father’s barn down, “just to see what it would do,” would enrage Sam and result in a public flogging. More seriously, he lost a friend, George Lockwood, while swimming in one of the many streams that fed the canal and river south of Milan. “After playing in the water a while, the boy with me disappeared in the creek,” Edison recalled, still matter-of-fact about the tragedy fifty-odd years later. “I waited around for him to come up but as it was getting dark I concluded to wait no longer and went home. Some time in the night I was awakened and asked about the boy. It seems the whole town was out with lanterns and had heard that I was last seen with him. I told them how I had waited and waited, etc. They went to the creek and pulled out his body.”12

Alva’s public education in Milan did not last much beyond the beginning of second grade, if indeed it lasted till then: “I used never to be able to get along at school. I don’t know now what it was, but I was always at the foot of the class….My father thought I was stupid, and at last I almost decided I must really be a dunce.”13

SHINGLES, STAVES, SPARS

At Detroit in the spring of 1854 Sam Edison loaded Nancy, Pitt, Tannie, and Alva aboard a little paddleship, the Ruby. They were bound for Port Huron, forty miles north down the St. Clair River. Marion remained behind with her husband Homer Page, to make what life they could in Milan. The town had gone into precipitous decline, killed by the advent of railroads. In just a few years its canal would silt up and disappear, along with the harbor and shipyard. Sam was smart to move when he did, from an inland port lapsing into decay to a lake port twice its size and thrumming with sawmills, annually shipping 93 million board-feet of pine lath, shingles, staves, and spars, along with fragrant cedar poles and bales of tanning bark.14 Having profited substantially from grain trading in Milan, as well as from his lumber business, he was poised to do even better in Port Huron.

He spent $2,800 on a double-story white frame house in the defunct military reserve of Fort Gratiot. It measured well over thirty-six hundred square feet inside—not counting a spacious cellar that would become Alva’s first laboratory. The ceilings were high and the windows large, opening to a surrounding ten-acre grove—also Sam’s property—with virgin woodland rising to the west and the St. Clair River entering Lake Huron in the east.15

Fort Gratiot’s most prominent architectural feature was its seventy-four-foot white brick lighthouse, signaling the junction of river and lake. It was fitted with smoky whale oil lamps that cast an oddly greenish glow through glass that daily had to be wiped clean of soot. Sam, ever the entrepreneur, was inspired by its height, and lack of accessibility to tourists, to erect an “observation” tower twenty-six feet higher on his own ground and open it to the public. For the first two or three years of the tower’s existence, he earned a supplementary income from this attraction. It afforded a magnificent, if rickety, panorama of lake, river, and the apposition of two nations, both of which he could in a sense call home.16

Sam during this brief period was at the crest of his modest success in business, dealing not only in lumber and grain and seventy-five-cent observatory tickets but also selling apples and pears from his orchard and vegetables from his small farm. Next he got into real estate, buying and selling local properties, and by the fall of 1856 he was worth an estimated $6,000.^*2 But his libertarian ethics were ill matched to the principles of property law, which required among other things that titles should be searched before a sale, and taxes paid after it.17

On 24 August 1857, just when such nuisances were beginning to affect Sam’s cash flow, the collapse of the Ohio Life Insurance Company, depressing railroad stocks, caused the nation’s first panic spread by telegram. Michigan was especially hurt by the subsequent recession. Detroit’s economy crashed; banks and businesses closed; bread lines formed; child beggars roamed the streets. Port Huron suffered similarly. In December Sam was indicted for real estate fraud. Rumor had it that he escaped bankruptcy, or worse, by putting his holdings in Nancy’s name. Credit reports issued during the winter of 1857–58 stated that he had “totally failed” as a businessman. Were it not for a livery business operated by Pitt Edison, and child farm labor eagerly supplied by Alva, Sam might have been forced to sell his white house in the grove.18

THE ONLY TEACHER

Alva’s boyhood in Port Huron is so little documented that it is impossible to say just when he went to school there. In his sixties he claimed to have had only three months of formal education. This was almost certainly an exaggeration, since he attended a private primary establishment run by the Rev. George Engle and, after a gap of several years, went to the town’s Union School. However short a stint he passed in each, it seems clear that he left the first for the same reason he was sent home from the little red schoolhouse in Milan—his “addled” strangeness—and that he quit the second at age twelve to begin his career as a railroad newsboy. It is also clear, in view of his learning difficulties in class, that the only teacher who understood him and fertilized his brain until then was Nancy Edison.19

“My mother was the making of me,” he once allowed, in a rare moment of self-revelation. “She was so true, so sure of me; and I felt that I had someone to live for, someone I must not disappoint.” Short, heavyset, gray-eyed, dark-browed, and austere, Nancy was the sister of two Baptist ministers and the granddaughter of a Quaker. She was a disciplinarian and kept, in Alva’s vivid memory, “a switch behind the old Seth Thomas clock that had the bark worn off.” Grim, however, Nancy was not: she had an ironic twinkle and perpetual hint of a smile about the lips, both of which she passed on to her son. There is no evidence she was disturbed by her failure to instill any piety in him. In all other respects her influence upon his intellectual development was profound.20

A family friend described her as “industrious, capable, literary and ambitious,” the significant adjective being the third. Another recalled how Alva and Nancy were left alone much of the time after Tannie married and moved out of the house in June 1855: “I well remember the old homestead, surrounded by the orchard, and frequently saw Mrs. Edison and her son conversing. Sometimes I noticed that she was instructing him in his lessons and I often wondered why he never went to school.” Yet another wrote him in old age, “One thing I can very distinctly remember is being in front of your house one day and seeing your mother standing at the door calling you to come in to your lessons.”21

The first books of any consequence they read together appear to have been a history of the Reformation and—more to Alva’s taste—Robert Sears’s The Family Instructor, or, Digest of General Knowledge Embracing the Various Divisions of History, Biography, Literature, Geography, Natural History, and the Other Sciences. Three and a half inches thick and profusely illustrated, it prepared him for some of the more formidable titles he and Nancy set themselves over the next four years, including Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Hume’s six-volume History of England, and Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. By the time they reached Richard Green Parker’s Natural Philosophy, the book that most influenced Alva in youth, his fundamental area of curiosity—the workings of nature in a godless world—was established, and Nancy effectively could teach him no more.22

THE WHOLE CIRCLE OF THE SCIENCES

Late in life Edison told Henry Ford that Parker’s encyclopedic tome was “the first book on science I read when a boy nine years old.” If he indeed studied it that early, he was well prepared to do so again when he entered the Union School at age eleven.23 Its formal title was A School Compendium of Natural and Experimental Philosophy, and the 1854 edition featured an ancillary subtitle: Containing Also a Description of the Steam and Locomotive Engines, and of the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph.^*3,24

“The whole circle of the sciences,” Alva read in the introduction, “consists of principles deduced from the discoveries of different individuals, in different ages, thrown into common stock. The whole, then, is common property, and belongs exclusively to no one.”25 Before he thought of venturing into the charmed circle himself, he was thus cautioned that countless others had preceded him, and even the greatest individuals among them—Copernicus, Newton, Franklin, Faraday—had based their work on the accumulating wisdom of mankind. There was no originality, except that of God the Creator. All inventions were but rediscoveries and rearrangements of primal matter.

Nancy Edison could have had no objection to that notion. But Parker made clear that his book would have nothing to do with the spiritual, moral, and intellectual branches of philosophy, namely, theology, ethics, and metaphysics. He was concerned only with the science of natural philosophy—“that which treats of the material world”—and within that science, “only the general properties of unorganized matter.”26

During the course of Alva’s lifetime, the word physics would replace natural philosophy as a scientific term. But Parker in 1856 insisted that the former discipline was more general than the latter. Physics comprised both natural history and natural philosophy—which was to say, organized as well as unorganized matter. He excluded chemistry from his book, on the grounds that it introduced human agency into the conditions and relations of bodies.27 Having thus restricted himself to an unbiological view of the universe, he proceeded to enumerate and describe every field that Alva would one day explore, with the exception of X-rays and botany—as if in some occult way he was remembering the boy’s future.

In a preliminary section, Of Matter and Its Properties, Parker listed the sixty-one known elements, exemplified in the elementary composition of rocks like granite. Forty-nine of the basic ingredients of nature were metallic, and although a proper consideration of them should be left to chemists, he wrote enough about the “malleability” and “ductility” of gold and platinum to make metallurgy sound like the most rewarding of sciences. An ounce of gold could be attenuated more than fifty miles in length, and “platinum can be drawn even to a finer wire than this.”28

Under Mechanics, Alva learned that there were six fundamental instruments: the lever, the pulley, the wedge, the screw, the inclined plane, and the wheel. If the last was built with a heavy rim and long, light spokes, force had to be applied to make it spin, but once put into motion, it would become a “fly-wheel,” and inertia would steady the revolutions of any machine that it drove. Those parts of a wheel or disk “furthest from the center of motion move with the greatest velocity; and the velocity of all the parts diminishes as their distance from the action of motion diminishes.”29

Parker defined Friction (in words guaranteed to convulse any schoolroom) as “the resistance which bodies meet with in rubbing against each other.” A Vacuum was “unoccupied space; that is, a space which contains absolutely nothing.” He showed a drawing of a hand-pump laboriously evacuating the air from a “glass vessel or bulbed receiver” and explained that air was essential to combustion. “Place a lighted taper, cigar, or any other substance that will produce smoke, under the receiver, and exhaust the air; the light will be extinguished, and the smoke will fall.” Under “Pneumatics,” Alva was informed that air was so elastic, total evacuation was almost impossible. However, when a tall, closed-top tube full of heavy mercury was dipped into a bowl of more mercury, gravity would partially pull the column down, leaving behind a “Torricellian vacuum…the most perfect that has been discovered.”30

The heading “Steam-Engine” rated a fourteen-page discussion, with explanatory diagrams and a beautiful woodcut of a paddle-wheeler thrashing along through undulant waves. Another illustration showed a pineapple-stacked locomotive, evocative of the one Alva would soon drive, solus, down forty-seven and a half miles of track.31

Under “What is Electricity?” he read the most important (if vague) definition he would ever have to memorize: “Electricity is the name given to an imponderable^*4 agent which pervades the material world, and which is visible only in its effects.” Apparently the term derived from the Greek word elektron for “amber”—a material that, when rubbed, became “excited,” drawing toward itself “pieces of paper, thread, cork, straw, feathers, or fragments of gold leaf.” There were many “non-electric” substances impervious to this force, and the “attraction and repulsion” between those that responded and those that did not was the fundamental, empowering conflict of nature.32

Some theorists thought of electricity as a fluid. Others denied its materiality and deemed it to be “a mere property of matter,” like magnetism. Parker believed it to be two fluids of opposite qualities, eternally seeking a counterbalance between “positive” and “negative,” and said that a modern consensus of scientific opinion had developed along those lines. Professor Faraday, he wrote (imprinting the name of the great experimentalist on Alva’s mind for the first time), had proposed a nomenclature of electricity that included the words anode for the positive element and cathode for the negative, in any flow of power through a conductor, or wire.33

Parker’s references to fluidity made Alva think, early on, of electricity in hydraulic terms. For the rest of his life he would see it pumping back and forth like water, but silently and weightless, palpable only in its power to shock or even kill. Possibly it might even be used, one day, to revive a dying person.34 There was an interesting account under “Galvanism” of an electrical test recently performed on a hanged murderer in Glasgow:

The galvanic battery employed consisted of 270 pairs of four-inch plates. On the application of the battery to different parts of the body, every muscle was thrown into violent agitation; the leg was thrown out with great violence, breathing commenced, the face exhibited extraordinary grimaces, and the finger seemed to point out the spectators. Many persons were obliged to leave the room from terror or sickness; one gentleman fainted, and some thought that the body had really come to life.35

Alva was able to study all the basic types of batteries, from voltaic piles to zinc-platinum Grove cells—powerful units, apparently, but inefficient, requiring constant replenishment of their sulfuric and nitric acid levels: a dangerous, cough-inducing chore.

Detailed discussions of “Magnetism” and “Electro-Magnetism” followed. Parker temptingly wrote that if “fine black sand,” or magnetite, was spilled on a sheet of paper with a horseshoe magnet beneath it, “the particles will be disposed to arrange themselves, in a regular order, and in the direction of the curve lines.” In a footnote, he printed Faraday’s thought-provoking speculation, on the basis of recent studies of sunspot activity, that there might be an electrical relationship between “astral and terrestrial magnetism.”36

Acoustics, Alva read, was “the science which treats of the nature and laws of sound. It includes the theory of musical concord or harmony.” Sound waves needed air to travel through, and the more humid the air the better: “A bell can be more distinctly heard just before a rain.” Conversely, if a bell was rung in an exhausted receiver, its chime could not be heard. Geometry and acoustics were intimately related: “The smooth and polished surface of interior parts of certain kinds of shells, particularly if they are spiral or undulating, fit them to collect and reflect the various sounds which are taking place in the vicinity.”37

Parker compared sound to light, in that it could be collected at one point after reflecting off several surfaces, for greater intensity and focus. Under “Optics”—“the science that treats of light, of colors, and of vision”—he cautioned that nobody, not even Sir Isaac Newton, really knew what light was. Newton had supposed it to consist of minute particles streaming from source to viewer—the “corpuscular” theory. But the sound analog, if valid, implied that light also traveled in waves. Hence “the opinions of philosophers of the present day are inclining to the undulatory theory.” Whichever notion was true, light moved so fast that it effortlessly delineated any movement perceptible to the human eye. This posed the counterquestion, When is motion imperceptible? Parker’s answer was “When the velocity of a moving body [a distant freighter on Lake Huron, say] does not exceed twenty degrees in an hour.”38

Oddly, he did not refer to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, although few boys Alva’s age were unfamiliar with the way a rapid series of still images drawn on flipped cards, or the drum of a zoetrope, seemed to move of their own accord. But there was a description on pages 245–46 of the magic lantern, with an illustration showing how it magnified and threw a glass slide’s colored image onto “a white surface prepared to receive it.”39

All optical media, Parker wrote, were luminous, transparent, or translucent—and the dioptrical subcategory, exemplified by lenses, bent light beams to their will according to whether they were convex or concave. This led him to an extended discussion of the physiology of the eye, including accounts of its sensitivity to abrupt changes of light and darkness—useful to any young reader who might one day be asked by the U.S. Navy to improve the vision of “splash observers” in wartime.40

The final sections of the book were devoted to “The Electro-Magnetic Telegraph” (with a useful Morse table that rendered Alva’s surname as • — •• •• ••• • • — •) and “Astronomy,” warning him that if he ever wanted to observe a total eclipse of the sun, it would last “little more than three minutes.”41

TWO HUNDRED BOTTLES

Before mastering some, or all, of the sciences Parker described, Alva at age eleven became a greengrocer—“marketing garden truck,” in the unglamorous phrase of the day. Sam Edison’s financial difficulties in the summer of 1857 were such that he had to grow and sell as much produce as the orchard and field around the house would supply. Thanks to the richness of Fort Gratiot’s soil, their bounty was copious.

Sam Edison tilling his field at Fort Gratiot, date unknown.

Alva took to the work with a will, plowing and planting eight acres of sweet corn, radishes, onions, parsnips, and beets: “I was very ambitious about this garden and worked very hard. My father had an old horse and wagon and with this we carried the vegetables to the town which was 1½ miles distant and sold them from door to door.” When, later in the season, pears and apples ripened in the orchard, Alva’s takings increased, and he was smart enough to hand them to his mother. In time he learned the fine art of packing figs in boxes with reinforced bottoms, suggesting more fruit than materialized in actual delivery.42

He persevered in greengrocery through the following two summers, at one point doing so well that he was able to give Nancy $600.43 Whatever pocket money he kept for himself, he invested in a chemical laboratory in the cellar of the Edison house.

Alva may have been motivated to equip this facility by Parker’s provocative insistence that chemistry had no part in natural philosophy, which was the study of the material world “as is.” Beyond physics, chemistry was the science that creatively investigated and “altered the natural arrangement of elements to bring about some condition that we desire.” In other words, it was an active rather than reactive application of mind to matter, in that respect more humanistic and challenging. He loved it from the start and was always happiest when he could retreat from the noise and fallibility of machines and privately mix powders. He once said that he wondered “how it was he did not become an analytical chemist instead of concentrating on electricity, for which he had at first no great inclination.”44

His juvenile laboratory’s principal feature was an array of two hundred bottles, all labeled poison in a deliberate, and effective, ploy to dissuade anyone else from tampering with them. Aided sometimes by a friend, Joseph Clancy, he concocted many volatile compounds that Nancy worried might explode. He failed to blow out the cellar windows, but he did succeed in wrecking a corner of the old telegraph office downtown, burning several other boys in the process.45

At some point in 1858 Alva hitched together enough lengths of stovepipe wire, along with old jars, nails, zinc, insulated copper coil, a Grove cell, and sprung brass keys, to put his laboratory in Morse communication with the Clancy house, one and a half miles away. With puberty looming (“Ma, I’m a bushel of wheat, I weigh eighty pounds”), it was his last childish indulgence before two sobering experiences transformed him into the beginnings of a man. One was a return to school—the Union School, in downtown Port Huron—possibly for only one eleven-week term. It flagged him as no more suited to the classroom than he had been twice before. The other was the mysterious trauma, whether medical, accidental, or in some other aspect pathological, that shut him off forever from ambient sound. No official record survives of what it was, if indeed any records were kept; by the time he was old enough to speak of his deafness without embarrassment, he did so without ever giving a convincing account of its cause. The casual admission he wrote at twenty-nine—“I haven’t heard a bird sing since I was twelve years old”—must stand in its simple poignancy as all that will ever be known of the matter.46

If his dating was precise, Alva lost three-quarters of his hearing several months before the advent of puffing, whistling locomotives and clanking cars broke Fort Gratiot’s harmonious web of natural sounds. At any rate he was a child no longer when, in the late fall of 1859, he persuaded Nancy to let him ride the Grand Trunk Railway wherever its steam would take him, down the track to all the years ahead.